Uses netlify's redirect functionality to make a personal URL shortener. Works beautifully :)
You want a URL shortener for your custom domain and you want an easy way to create and update URLs but you don't want to pay hundreds of dollars a year.
This relies on Netlify's
_redirects file for building a
super simple URL shortener where the URLs are managed on GitHub and Netlify
handles the redirecting for you.
- Installation
- Usage
- Bash Function
- FAQ
- What about analytics?
- Can I keep my links private?
- Inspiration
- Other Solutions
- Contributors
- LICENSE
This module is distributed via npm which is bundled with node and
should be installed as one of your project's devDependencies:
npm install --save-dev netlify-shortener
Your project should have a _redirects file that looks like this:
/example http://example.com
# fallback
/* https://your-website.com
This module exposes a binary that you should use in your package.json scripts.
You also need to add a baseUrl to your package.json:
{
"baseUrl": "https://jsair.io",
"scripts": {
"shorten": "netlify-shortener"
}
}Then you can run:
npm run shorten # simply formats your _redirects file
npm run shorten https://yahoo.com # generates a short code and adds it for you
npm run shorten https://github.com gh # adds gh as a short URL for you
The netlify-shortener does a few things:
- generates a short code if one is not provided
- validates your URL is a real URL
- adds the URL to the top of
_redirects - runs a git commit and push (this will trigger netlify to deploy your new redirect)
- Copies the short URL to your clipboard
Netlify's deploys are normally fast enough that the new URL should be deployed by the time you've shared it to someone.
If you want to be able to run this anywhere in the terminal, you can try making
a custom bash function (place this in your ~/.bash_profile file):
shorten() { node {path-to-local-repo}/node_modules/.bin/netlify-shortener "$1" "$2"; }How to do this on windows? I don't know, if you figure it out, please open a PR to replace this note with instructions :)
I don't think Netlify will give you analytics, but you should be able to set up CloudFlare in front of your domain and I think they'll give you analytics.
Netlify doesn't charge for linking up private repositories (HOW COOL IS THAT!?) so you can make your GitHub repo private and that should keep your links private.
URL shorteners for custom domains and custom short codes are insanely expensive. Hiveam.com was the best price-wise, but the price went up and it's super expensive as well.
So I
tried writing a custom netlify function
and it worked pretty well, but then I was tipped of by
smart
people that
using Netlify's built-in _redirects functionality would work well and it does!
So I built this tool to make it easier to do this for the two domains I need this for and now you can use it too!
I'm not aware of any, if you are please make a pull request and add it here!
Thanks goes to these people (emoji key):
 Kent C. Dodds 💻 📖 🚇 |
 Carl Rosell 🤔 |
 Phil Hawksworth 🤔 |
|---|
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!
MIT